Become part of a dynamic team!

The latest news out of Toryland is that the Conservatives are slashing funding to the Status of Women Canada program. According to the Globe and Mail, this program will see $5 million cut from its $23 million annual budget during the next two years.

I have no idea whether the Status of Women Canada program actually benefits women enough to justify its budget, but this cut gives the impression that the Tories don’t particularly care about women. This is a rather odd decision for a party that works so hard to try to put a positive spin on its actions and is obviously desperate to earn a majority government.

The Globe also reported that Canadian economic growth has sunk to its lowest rate in three years. I take full blame for this: whenever I am looking to enter the job market, the economy always goes into the tank. Sorry about that, everyone!

Mind you, in the technical writing field there is always work available. There are always a couple of really crappy jobs that about six to eight recruiting agencies are trying desperately to fill. Here’s a made-up job description that sums up the worst features of these jobs:

Experienced, dynamic, team-oriented technical writer needed to create a set of documents for a rapidly evolving leading-edge software product. This is a two-month fixed-price contract position. The successful candidate may also be assigned to produce marketing materials and perform quality assurance testing, and might also be required to take notes at company meetings.

This writer must have expert knowledge of FrameMaker, Microsoft Word, Photoshop, Illustrator, Power Point and Visio, and must supply his or her own laptop computer containing the necessary software.

The writer must be a highly motivated self-starter and team player, able to juggle multiple simultaneous responsibilities and meet extremely aggressive deadlines. Some travel may be required.

I’ve never seen a job with all of these non-redeeming features, but I have seen jobs that were so bad that no one wanted to take them. One job, with one of the big international accounting firms, required both marketing and technical writing, but paid substantially below market rates. One recruiter who called me about this job spent several minutes complaining to me about having to spend so much time trying to talk people into considering what was obviously an awful job.

And I once got contacted about a contract position at a company where the technical staff were all working 70 to 90 hour weeks. Whoa. That’s some scary mojo going on there.

Dry your eyes

Today, I have been listening to The Streets’ “Dry Your Eyes”. It’s about a man who is just discovering that his girlfriend wants to break up with him. He’s desperately trying to hold on to her – literally – but she’s already made up her mind.

If the authors of I Love You, Nice To Meet You are to be believed, the poor guy in that song didn’t stand a chance. One of the authors, Kevin Bleyer, claims that many women break up with their boyfriends without telling them. As Bleyer puts it, “When a woman breaks up with us, she’s not actually breaking up with us. The transaction happened long ago. We’re simply being debriefed. She’s just getting us up to speed.” The female half of the author team, Lori Gottlieb, claims, “Women may be guided by emotion, but when it comes to ending a relationship, we’re as cold-blooded as Saddam Hussein.” (Hey, I’m just quoting, not necessarily agreeing!)

I got this in the mail today:

Hi,

VrAGRA
CrALiS
VALrUM

web address: [deleted]

what we heed to make this prison world a thing of the past.

And I got a new bank scam message that started like this:

Dear Friend,

I wish to accost you with a request that would be of immense benefit to both of us. Being an executor of wills, it is possible that we may be tempted to make fortune out of our client’s situations, when we cannot help it, or left with no better option.

Erm… dude, you’re supposed to make this sound like a good thing.

In the news today, John Tory, the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party, is calling for a province-wide registry listing houses that had been formerly used as marijuana “grow-ops”. I don’t see the point of this. Does growing marijuana in a house cause structural damage to the building?

I’m off now to finally bite the bullet: I’m going to update my computer to include all of the latest Microsoft Windows XP updates. This might take ages. When I’m done, my hard drive might be a smoking ruin. If you never hear from me again, you’ll know why; tell my next of kin that I love them, will you?

Personal injury at track level

Toronto subway service was disrupted during this evening’s rush hour, as the power was out at Dundas station due to a “personal injury at track level”. This is the TTC’s polite euphemism for a jumper.

According to a NOW magazine article from 2004, the TTC doesn’t publicize the number of suicides and suicide attempts on their subway lines, as they don’t want to encourage copycat attempts. But, apparently, there’s usually one jumper a week. Some veteran drivers have seen two dozen or more people jump in front of their trains – which, needless to say, is a horribly traumatic experience.

Two years ago, I was on a train that somebody jumped in front of. It was heading into Rosedale station; I was on the last car. From my vantage point, all I knew was that the train had come to a sudden stop halfway into the platform. Those of us in the back half of the train were asked to walk through the subway cars until we reached a car that was inside the station.

I did not want to see anything related to the accident, but I couldn’t have seen anything even if I did want to: by the time I got out of the train, the entire platform and all available vantage points were blocked by gawkers. Needless to say, this did not improve my opinion of the human race.

I have had one other sorta scary moment on a TTC vehicle. Many years ago, I was on a Carlton streetcar when a power line broke and landed on the roof of the car. We were told to leave the car, and were told not to step down from the last step of the car onto the street, but to jump down. Apparently, anyone who had one foot on the car and one on the ground would have been electrocuted. (Thankfully, there were no elderly or infirm people on the streetcar.) I walked north to the Danforth, feeling very very weird and grateful to be alive.

A PM’s work is never done

More fun in Harper Valley: Garth Turner, who was recently turfed out of the Conservative caucus, is ranting about his former leader once again. According to the Globe, Turner claims that the religious right have a pipeline into Stephen Harper’s office. He cited a comment by evangelist Charles McVety, who boasted that he could reach the Prime Minister in two minutes flat, any time he wanted.

Turner, according to the Globe, also claims that the Harper government is centrally controlled, with no input accepted from Conservative MPs and no dissent tolerated. Apparently, the Tories’ major legislative accomplishments this past year were all created on high: the Clean Air Act, the budget, the income trust legislation and the commitment to action in Afghanistan were presented to the Tory caucus as finished products.

You know, sometimes I feel sorry for Mr. Harper. It must take a lot of work to run Canada all by himself. You get the impression that he is so smart that he is afraid to delegate anything: if someone else does it, he thinks they’ll likely do it wrong. I’ve known managers who were like that.

The problem with having one person create policy – or one very small, select group – is that even the smartest people can’t come up with all the right answers. That’s why democracy works better than all the other types of government. In a democracy, more people are given the opportunity to influence the government and its decisions. The more input you get, the better the result is.

If Harper continues to try to create policy in a vacuum, he’ll make mistakes, which will make voters unhappy. And it won’t take too many unhappy voters to push the Conservatives back into opposition. At least, that’s what I’m hoping.

Also in today’s Globe: a group of Liberal women are accusing the Tories of wanting to keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. This is more entertaining than television!

And a shout-out to the people of Vancouver, who have had to endure a whole mess of trouble. First, there was a whole lot of rain and mudslides, which led to a boil-water advisory. Then, there was a huge snowstorm: according to the National Post, Vancouver got 9 cm this weekend, which is a record for this time of year, and parts of the Fraser Valley got up to 46 cm. (That’s about a foot and a half, for you Imperial types.) Next up, the Big Freeze: the temperature is supposed to drop to -11C tonight. Of course, what constitutes a freeze depends on where you are: in Winnipeg, -11C is nothing.

Meanwhile, in Toronto, it’s currently 12C. Okay, the sun has disappeared, and it’s not likely to come back this week, or perhaps ever. But we don’t have snow, and you do. This is payback for all those beautiful February spring days in Stanley Park. Na na na nyah na.

By the way, here is a weather cam for Vancouver, and a collection of live cams for Toronto and other places in Ontario.

Changing attitudes

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that “accepted wisdom” – the rules and mores of a culture – changes over time. I’m old enough now to have seen a few of these changes.

For instance, I remember when the third-person singular pronoun was always “he” or “him”. Nowadays, that would seem a little unusual, if not sexist, as most writers are trying to make a point of being gender neutral. Similarly, “Ms.”, as in “Ms. Joan Smith”, is now a commonly accepted title. In the 1960s, married women were not only referred to as “Mrs.”, but often were denied the right to see their own first names in print, being referred to as “Mrs. John Smith”.

Also, here’s something that people younger than about 35 to 40 would find hard to believe: before about 1980, drinking and driving was (more or less) socially tolerated. It wasn’t considered a good thing, but it was accepted that, every now and again, people might find it difficult to drive home. I am just old enough to remember when people would come into their workplace and joke about how they didn’t remember how they got home last night. Nobody would do that now. (This, I hasten to add, is a decided improvement.)

I was thinking of this when reading Bill Bryson’s memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Like all of Bryson’s books, his memoir contains a lot of fascinating facts tossed in as asides. For example, he talks about the early atomic tests conducted by the U.S. The size and scope of these tests boggle the mind. Governments were taking risks they wouldn’t dare take now.

For example, the largest of these bombs was a hydrogen bomb that was exploded underground in Nevada in 1962. The blast was powerful enough to raise the land around it by 300 feet, and left a crater 800 feet across. Bryson quotes historian Peter Goodchild, who wrote that the resulting radioactive fallout was so thick that street lights came on, in broad daylight, 200 miles away. The fallout was scattered over six states and two provinces – none of which were warned about impending radioactivity.

Bryson also describes the first hydrogen bomb test, in Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1954. (The bikini was named after this.) The flash was visible over 2600 miles away, and the atoll is still uninhabitable today.

Attitudes towards sex were also different back then. In the 1950s, according to Bryson, most of the United States had laws prohibiting oral sex, anal sex, homosexuality, and sex between unmarried couples. And, apparently, in Indiana you could receive up to 14 years in prison for suggesting to anyone under 21 that masturbating could, perhaps, be a good idea.

Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away, which I’ve just started reading, describes the restrictions on sex in even more detail. Here’s a few of them:

• Unmarried women who became pregnant were invariably shunned, and were shunted off to a home for unwed mothers to have their baby safely out of sight and out of mind. These babies were then put up for adoption.
• In Connecticut, a physician was arrested in 1961 for giving contraceptive information to a married woman.
• In 1967, in Massachusetts, a man was sentenced to 36 days in jail for “crimes against chastity” for giving vaginal foam to a woman after a lecture on birth control.
• Birth control was not universally available in the United States until 1972.

To make things worse: it was hard to obtain a divorce in those days, to put it mildly. According to the Canadian government archives, before 1968 a divorce in Canada required an Act of Divorce to be passed by the Canadian Parliament. A person wanting a divorce had to have an announcement published in the Canada Gazette and two local newspapers. This announcement had to contain the date and place of the marriage and the reason for the divorce petition. In the case of adultery or bigamy, a co-respondent was often listed. Six months later, if the petition was allowed, Parliament would grant the divorce.

If you’re curious, apparently you can look up divorce petitions in the Library and Archives Canada database.

Utilize in the swift attack!

Another day, another wodge of spam. The Debora spam appears to have died down, at least for the moment – perhaps some desperate system administrator tracked the spammer down and shot him. But today I got one message written in German, and another in Japanese. Thanks to Babelfish, and its slightly inaccurate translations, here’s what they have to say.

First, the German:

“Why ever more humans does their private Sexfilme show in the InterNet?”

We know why: Because it geil is and one can make also still money. To [URL deleted] at present thousand Germans show, what they find geil and which them make geil and leave themselves thereby from millions InterNet users secretly to observe. “the world to guest with friends” appears there in completely different light, if Susanne from Berlin demonstrates offenherzig its intimate range or if his Mrs. Anna in the Homevideo spoils and vollsaut Peter from Hamburg according to all rules of the art.

Schau you pig-purely on [URL deleted] AND earn money, if you high-load pictures and videos from you.

HERE CLICKING!

I like the Japanese version better:

* The partner who answers your various needs offer *

Mass being on the register such as etching limited opposite support OK & serious sweetheart collection & tele etching limited opposite support stewardess nurse model SECRETARY housewife getting the partner of your ideal thoroughly, please pass the hot night. Both man and woman relief! With free address register possibility! Favorite partner and number exchange and adding exchange freedom! Registration fee, year fee, altogether there is no introduction charge and a withdrawal from membership charge!

[URL deleted]

< Perfection no charge >

Being to issue after the registering the free ID free pass instantaneously, you can utilize in the swift attack.

Yes! Utilize in the swift attack!

I have a new pet peeve: people who stop at the top of an escalator while they try to figure out where to go next. Um, this isn’t good.

And, today, I saw an SUV with two women in the front, each of whom was using a cellphone to talk to somebody else. Weird.

And Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt” may be the greatest song in the history of the universe. Prove me wrong.

Tales of IT Recruiting

I feel sorry for IT recruiters, especially ones working for firms that are struggling to try to establish a niche in the industry. Their jobs must be no fun at all. They’re constantly on the phone cold-calling employers or job-seekers. They have to dress professionally (on what probably isn’t a professional salary). And they know full well that their field is overpopulated and that they themselves are easily replaced. I especially can’t help but feel sympathy for somebody who is calling from a crowded office environment: when you can hear several voices in the background of your conversation, you can tell that your poor caller is working from a desk instead of a cubicle or an office.

Having said that, I have to say this: there are a lot of bad recruiters out there. I’ve had to enter the job market several times in the last few years, and I have a lot of stories to tell.

First off: there seem to be many firms that try to fill positions by contacting several recruiters at once. (Maybe they’re in a hurry or something.) When I have a resume active on monster.ca, I find I can tell when one of these new positions hits the streets, as I usually get called about it by two or three recruiters.

My personal record for most times being contacted about the same position is eight – three of which were from the same recruiting firm, and two of which were from the same recruiting firm within a half-hour of each other. The firm must have hired a bunch of newbies and turned them loose on the same database. I found it amusing, but felt compelled to tell recruiter #3 that perhaps he might want to touch base with his colleagues. (Of course, he might be being asked to compete with his colleagues for a position. Yuck.)

Somebody once called me at 7 in the morning. I was awake – it was the Monday after the shift to Eastern Standard Time – but wow, that’s early.

A few years ago, I had just decided to accept an offer of a writing job from a startup company. The week before I started work, I got a call from a recruiter wanting to talk with me about an “opportunity” (which is what they always call them). When I said that I was about to start a new job, he tried to talk me into taking his job instead of the one I was about to start. Curious, I asked for details – it turned out he was recruiting for the position I had just accepted.

A recruiter phoned me on a Sunday about a job that had been going around a lot of agencies. When he provided details, I told him that I had already applied for that job through another agency. He then offered to try to get me a higher hourly rate, provided that I pull my application from the other agency and go through him instead. Ick.

Some really bad recruiters use a simple checklist when trying to determine suitability for a position, asking questions that have “yes” or “no” answers. (“Do you have the following skills: Microsoft Office? HTML? FrameMaker?”) I don’t see how this serves as an effective screening tool at all, as the temptation to answer “yes” to everything would be difficult for some job seekers to resist. (Me, I’m always honest. This may not be an effective strategy, but I can look at myself in the mirror without flinching.)

And last, and definitely least: I was contacted by a recruiting firm that wanted me to go out to Mississauga for a face-to-face interview. When I asked whether we could do this over the phone (I don’t have a car), the caller said no. After the caller hung up, I did a Google search on the firm’s name, and found out that there had been complaints about them: apparently, they get candidates into their office, and then try to offer them “special access to the hidden job market” for a fee. Worse still, the fee is apparently based on an estimate of the candidate’s ability to pay. If you’re well dressed, and look vulnerable, they’ll try to hit you up for more.

All of this would be annoying enough if recruiters were successful at finding people jobs. But I’ve found that I virtually never get good job leads through recruiters: they only get their hands on jobs that nobody really wants. Which is why I’m trying to learn how to network – which is a difficult thing for a shy geeky person to do!

Let’s go egosurfing now, everybody’s learning how

Please pardon me in advance – this entry is all about me. Or, rather, about my name.

I think that everybody searches the web for their own name every now and again. This practice is so common that it has its own name: egosurfing. (It’s also called autogoogling, which sounds vaguely unsavory.) For me, the fun part of egosurfing isn’t finding references to myself on the web – I already know what I’ve done on (or to) the web. The fun part is finding references to people with the same name as me who aren’t me.

Here are some of the references I found to people named Dave Till who aren’t me. Some of them may refer to the same person; I’m not sure. All I know is that they refer to somebody with my name.

• An executive MBA graduate from Lancaster University in England, who was happy enough with the program to write a testimonial about it
• An entry in the Internet Movie Database
• A Scottish Hill racer
• A publicity manager for Universal Hall in Scotland (this Dave is also a poet)
• The area manager for the Langdale/Ambleside Mountain Rescue Team
• A horn player with John Wetton’s first band
• Spiderman in costume
• Why be a Responsible Business? (a PDF file)
• A Regional Programme Manager for Rural Action, Business In The Community (this might be the same Dave as the one above, seeing as how it’s about business and all)
• A Scottish bed and breakfast (the page just lists Mrs Till as the proprietor, but the Google entry lists a Dave Till, so I’m counting this one)
• A man selling a heavy anvil that had been in his grandfather’s barn
• The Creamer Company extends its sympathy to Dave and Jim Till for their loss of a son and nephew (PDF file – this one was spooky, as my father’s name is Jim)
• Somebody selling used medical equipment

And there’s a few for my given name of David Till as well:

• A retired professor of computer science
• Another Internet Movie Database entry
• My namesake has married Maureen Galvin (may they have many happy years together)
• The publisher of the Jerusalem Medley (Instrumental Pak)
• A participant in a Taiwan exchange program

There’s also a singer named David Till from Malaysia, but his page is gone, alas. And there’s my second cousin Dave from Wisconsin (hi, if you’re reading this!).

When I lived in the Beach district of Toronto (from 1996 to 2000), I used to get phone calls for another Dave Till, as I was the only one with that name in the phone book. I found out things about him – one phone call at a time – but I never met him. I can tell you, though, that he was a stage manager living in Toronto, and he had an old buddy named Ern who lived in Hawkesville, Ontario.

Yet more politics

Lots of interesting political news today.

First off: the Globe reported that Prime Minister Stephen Harper referred to Quebec as a “nation within a united Canada”. This has produced the usual heated discussion that occurs whenever the topic of Quebec is brought up.

For someone like me – an anglophone from Toronto – the whole question of Quebec as a “nation” is difficult to get a handle on because I don’t know what the French-language equivalent of “nation” is. Does “nation” refer to the people of Quebec and their traditions, or an actual physical nation-state with boundaries?

For what it’s worth, I believe that Quebec is obviously a unique political entity with its own culture, heritage and tradition. Equally obviously, Quebec is a part of Canada. Canada has never existed without Quebec, and Quebec would not function as effectively if it were forced to go it alone.

I think that Quebecois humorist Yvon Deschamps probably put it best: he once claimed that what Quebec wanted was a strong independent Quebec within a strong united Canada.

The news out of Iraq is not exactly good: the Globe reported today that this October was the deadliest month yet for civilians there, as 3709 were killed. (To put this in perspective: about 3000 people died in the 9/11 attacks.) This tops the previous record of 3590 killed in July.

There seems to be no good potential outcome to all of this. It doesn’t look like the U.S. is going to be able to accomplish what it set out to achieve in Iraq. If they don’t pull out, there will be more civilian and U.S. military deaths. If they do pull out, it’s likely that the most ruthless of the groups trying to seize control of the country will wind up in charge, because that’s what usually happens. Either way, life for the ordinary people of Iraq is going to be just plain awful.

From what I’ve read, the Republican administration were guilty of a failure of imagination. Did they really believe that the Iraqis would welcome the incoming Americans as liberators, and that everything would turn magically wonderful once Saddam was overthrown? Or are there people in charge who don’t really care what happens to the Iraqi people, as long as the oil keeps flowing and large corporations get their revenue? Is there anybody in the Bush administration who is that callous?

Going back in time

I love the Internet Archive.

For one thing, it contains a copy of the long-lost page for the Fibblesnork Uber-Garlic Pickle (“the only pickle with hang time”). Here is the recipe, and here are some quotes from satisfied customers. Since I normally order my chicken wings with either mild or bland sauce – whichever is wimpier – I dare not try one.

The Internet Archive includes copies of every single web page throughout history that they could get their hands on. It isn’t a complete record, but it’s pretty impressive. For example, it has preserved copies of my web site from 2000 and 2003. (Try not to laugh too hard – hey, you had to learn too.)

But, best of all, it contains the Prelinger Archives. This is a collection of old health and safety films from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s – the sort you or your parents might have been shown in health class. (Health class was always a little strange because – at least in my school – they had separate health classes for boys and girls. You always wondered: what was going on in the other class?) The archive also includes collections of old commercials, animated short features, and much, much more. And everything in the archive is in the public domain. You can download these films, watch them, show them to your friends, include them in your own works of art, or anything you want.

Here’s some of my favourites:

Duck and Cover (1951): One of the most famous health and safety films ever. Bert the Turtle tells kids what to do if an atomic bomb goes off in their home town: duck as low as possible, and cover yourself with a coat or an old newspaper.

The House In The Middle (1954): The premise is simple: neat, tidy and freshly painted houses are more likely to survive an atomic blast. You absolutely have to watch this movie.

Boys Beware (1961): You might think that the streets of Fresno were safe for boys, especially in the early 1960s. Not so fast, says Sid Davis Productions: after all, there are, gasp, homosexuals lurking everywhere! Companion movies from Sid Davis are Girls Beware and The Strange Ones.

In My Merry Oldsmobile (1932): Wonderful early animated feature, plus singalong footage. The cartoon probably could not be shown on national television today, as it’s a bit too suggestive for the delicate eyes of network censors. (Plus, it includes footage of a newly married couple fighting each other with boxing gloves on.)

Are You Ready For Marriage? (1950): The title alone is worth the download.

Body Care and Grooming (1948): Ditto.

My Japan (1945): Made when America was at war, this is a portrayal of the enemy as hard-working and ruthless. Its intent was to scare Americans into fighting harder. Features a Caucasian actor with ludicrously bad Japanese makeup and accent.

Your Name Here (1960): A sendup of self-congratulatory advertising films produced by companies that wanted to trumpet their achievements to the world.

All of these films, and everything else in the archive, are available in DVD quality or in a more compact computer-viewable size.